This needs to be made into a short film.

Screw this, I' m tired of observing silently.

It' s a time loop, it' s not linear. Who came first, the egg or the hen ?
A circle has no beginning and no end. A time loop in a stable time-line is a self-sustaining ouroboros.


It' s probably impossible, but hey, how would I know ?

 

With all due respect,


who gives a fuck?

 

The irretrievably insane.

 

A time loop is impossible if you are claiming causality. In the butterfly example used, causality is assumed (he was born because he killed the butterfly), so it takes on linear time and does not make a circle. It creates a fixed paradoxical segment of time that cannot exist.

 

I don' t undestand what you mean, it' s both a line (causal) and a circle (looping). With the postulates we chose one doesn' t exclude the other.

We' re claiming both causality and the use of a time-machine in a certain way, which yes, leads to an infinite time loop that is its own cause, it dies and regenerates itself at the same time, its occurrences both equal to one and the infinite.

Two parallel lines can cross each other if you hold some specific postulates to begin with. If shouldn' t come as a surprise that funky postulates lead to funky conclusions.

I' m far from being a physics expert but, as I understand it, we don' t know if human time-travel is possible, we don' t know if absolute causality drives everything, and we don' t know if the universe time-line is linear or not. In a nutshell time is a mind**** and we don' t know much about it.

 

This is not possible, because time is not coming full circle. It is just continually rewinding one segment of time and replaying it again. It is still a linear movie, but it is broken part of the tape, and so it cannot exist.

Which is the same as saying that it never happened. If a reality, such as a finite segment that keeps rewinding itself, exists, then there is no way to tell that it exists, and its looping is proof of its paradoxical nature. The basis of causality is that every event must have a cause that precedes it on the time line. That no event can bring itself into existence, it must have an outside cause. A domino to set it in motion. Your argument is that a domino makes itself fall over, which makes no sense, because its natural inclination is to just sit there until something else pushes it. Because this domino cannot fall over without being pushed, and you are arguing that nothing else did push it, it will, logically, never fall over, or never happen. It is the same as the domino not existing at all, because we will never see it come into play. No piece of mass can set itself in motion; it has no energy on its own. A domino will never make itself fall over. At the most basic level, gravity will make it fall over, and not the domino itself. The same argument applies to any event is causal space time; that any event that is not pushed over by a preceding event will never happen, and thus is logically impossible or inconsistent with the law of causality.

If causality exists, then it drives everything, or else it is a useless concept that is not good for consistently defining anything. We do not know that is it perfect, but all science points to causality and determinism as the basis for any event. The only flaw in this system is defining a first cause, and we are close to defining that, if I remember my scientific journals correctly.

 

The only thing that loops is causality, the characters live the whole thing in a linear fashion.

Isn' t the postulate "a time machine is used somewhen in a causal time-line to go in the past" a big enough domino to rule out the "precedes" part ? If you assume a future causal reason is paradoxical and impossible then you assume a time-travel to the past in a causal universe is paradoxical and impossible, but we postulated it wasn' t. Sure it' s crazy, but all the stories of this kind that I' ve seen embrace their craziness with opened arms.

The strongest sword and the strongest shield are both paradoxical and impossible, it doesn' t prevent people to postulate or imagine they aren' t and write stories about them.

A first cause ? A domino that fell by itself ? And what about our choices ? Are we certain that free will is always an illusion ?

 

Causality is the thing that cannot loop, not a person's perception. I can perceive a series of events in a looping fashion, but causality is linear. A circle of dominoes will never start to fall over, it will just sit there as a concept, never happening, because it has nothing to push it over.

No... You could theoretically go back in time if going back in time did not affect your personal time line. However, you are a product of causality, and if you change something about yourself such that you do not go back in time, or do not go back in time to do the same thing, then there will be a paradox. If you change your present such that you do not want to go back in time, then you will not have gone back in time to change the present, leaving you with a failed time travel attempt. It is the argument that if you go back in time and to stop a war, then that war will not have happened in the future any more, and the you in the future will not think 'I should go back in time and stop this war' because there is no war to be stopped. You cannot do it. In order for you to travel back in time, all of the events in that immediate causal line must stay unhindered, or a different set of events will be caused, and those events will not have you going back in time to change the past. The only way to go back in time and change something is to go back knowing nothing and by chance change something that did not affect your life in the future at all.

I do not assume, I work out a logical break down. This is how things work in a causal line of reasoning. The English alphabet will represent one causal line, and Roman numerals will represent another.

1. Event A takes place.
2. Event B is caused by interaction with Event A.
3. Event C is caused by a culmination of Events A and B.
4. Event D is caused by a culmination of Events A, B and C.
5. Person E is born, but not Person I, because of the culmination of Events A, B, C and D.

In your postulate, Person I goes back in time and causes his own existence instead of Person E's. But he was never born in this causal line, so his being there to go back in time never happened to begin with. There was nothing to cause him to exist, so he would not exist. Naturally, someone who whose existence was not caused in this line cannot go back in time on this line. It makes perfect sense.

They are not impossible if the other does not exist. And then they are not impossible. Being the 'strongest' is not how the story goes. The story states that a merchant has a shield that cannot be broken by any sword, and a sword that cannot be broken by any shield. They are more than just the strongest of their types, they are laws of nature that contradict. They cannot exist at the same time, but without their counterparts, there is no paradox to speak of.

No...? That does not satisfy a first cause argument. The infinite regress argument cannot be solved by saying that time is infinite or that it loops. First there was nothing, that is the assumption. And then there was something. An event, an existence. Change. What caused the change? The change cannot cause itself; all things tend toward nonexistence, or stillness. Matter stands still without an outside force to push it around. Momentum does not build unless something starts it moving. What started it moving is left completely unsatisfied by most models of the universe that we have today, but we are still looking into it. I look forward to the day when we can prove how something can come from nothing... Or if it cannot, what the alternative is.

 

And this is the new Spiderman, people.

 

I think Nekoki already said it, but you can' t change anything in a stable time loop plot.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StableTimeLoop

Sorry, poor wording on my part. They can exist at the same time in a story (the trick is to never make them meet).

God ? ^^ (don' t answer that)
The way you said it I thought you read a possible explanation somewhere, never-mind then.

Man, this thread isn' t spamy at all ...
[video=youtube;H1kpVq_vW5w]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1kpVq_vW5w[/video]

 

The only difference between a random occurrence of instances and a time loop plot is whether or not you call it a time loop plot. As I said earlier, what this is arguing is that things can happen without causes, or, they can happen randomly. In one instant, Bob exists, in the next instant, Bob does not. This is set in stone. Without causality, there is no logical way to order these instances such that they loop. It is like taking many pictures from the same spot with each picture being completely unassociated with the next. You cannot tell which one came first or which one came last, because causality is not apparent or consistent. It is just a jumble of frames without meaning. And it makes no sense but makes a story, I will give you that much.

You are right, I was going to say that myself. However, if you were to meet the two concepts logically, as we are doing, then they would contradict conceptually, which is as good as proving that they cannot exist in reality.

I will answer it anyway. God is still a domino that needs something to push him over. If he were outside of causality, then he would be stasis, never changing, and it would be as if he never existed.

Heh. This show looks like it might entertain me for a few moments.

 

How about this :

Add an entrance to the left and an exit to the right and you' ll have a visual metaphor of a stable time loop.
Such a staircase is a paradox, you can' t build it in reality, and yet you can imagine it. Each step in the loop has a preceding and a following step. It doesn' t make sense and yet at the same time it does, it' s just a matter of perspective (literally). Just watching it is enough to get its rules. We know that the continuity that we see is an illusion but we see it anyway.

 

In other words, perception is flawed. However, this staircase, to my knowledge, is only paradoxical in the matter kind of sense. It reminds me of the game Echochrome. Something may change function simply by looking at it differently. But that does not work in reality. Illusions may be entertaining but they can be deadly; do not assume that a door exists just because you see one. You should try and touch it first. It may be an illusion, or smoke and mirrors.

The same logic is applied to magic tricks; while reading the story or watching the performance, you do not want to find out how it works and prove that it cannot unless you are me. You want to be fooled.

 

Too much for me to read right now... i am in a film class though.

 

Even if I can touch it, smell it, taste it, hear it, x-ray it, mesure it and weight it, it can still be an illusion. I usually don' t have the time to do all of this 1000000 times from every conceivable angle to be almost sure. Not trusting your senses can be pretty deadly too.

Anyway, I don' t forget for a second that stable time loop plots rely on pretty big "ifs".

Nah, I like to know what' s behind the curtain too. ^^

 

While I agree, the senses make up reality. Whether the door actually has physical mass or not, if you cannot just walk through it without opening it, then it is as good as there. When something looks impossible, assume that you are looking at it wrong and try perceiving it in a different way.

And they could never happen. Nonsensical time streams like that would jumble up memories as well, and individuals would all but cease to exist in lieu of random frames.

Then that makes two of us.